I tracked how Google and Amazon push stealth updates, and it completely explained my broken phone apps

I don’t mind my update-heavy life, because, on the whole, updates are good. They improve features I love and fix bugs.

At least they did.

Recently, it feels like updates have become a riskier prospect. We’ve seen horror story after horror story in the news.

Why are things suddenly so bad, and does this give us a sneak peek at our future?

Every update has become a minefield

I didn’t always see updates as a good thing.

When I was a teenager, a bad Windows XP update knocked out the family PC’s internet connection altogether, and as the impromptu computer expert, it was down to me to fix it.

Judicious use of the computer’s restore point eventually fixed the problem, but not until I swore to switch off all updates altogether.

And I did. It took years for me to trust that Microsoft knew what it was doing and turn them back on again.

The world moved on, and those sorts of issues became a lot less common. I now largely trust the updates that come down the pipeline, but recent events are starting to change that.

I’ve been covering mobile tech for close to a decade, and I’ve never experienced such volatility when it comes to operating system and app updates.

The Pixel battery drain bug is the most infamous of these recently, but we’ve also seen problems hit the first-generation of Pixel Fold as well.

Amazon’s devices and apps have been particularly hard done by. We’ve seen two successive Kindle updates pulled for causing enormous problems, including a big battery drain bug that flatlined Kindle batteries.

The Audible app recently had an update that introduced a cell data draining bug that cost some people real money in fees.

Even juggernauts in the space, like the YouTube app, have just been bad recently. I’ve had some terrible bugs where descriptions and comment sections disappear entirely.

Problems are cropping up all over the place, and they all seem to have appeared through recent updates. What’s going on?

What is causing all of this?

I’ll be completely honest with you — I have absolutely no idea why everything seems to be broken right now. But I have some suspicions.

My suspicions were aroused a few months ago when I reported that Amazon pulled a Kindle update. A Reddit commenter found a certain amount of schadenfreude in the situation and claimed that Amazon had laid off a bunch of people and replaced them with vibe coding.

The implications were obvious — the problems are due to vibe coding. Code written by generative AI is prone to hallucinations and is highly likely to contain bugs and issues. Or at least, that’s the theory.

The theory was somewhat confirmed a month later, when it was quietly discovered that Amazon had changed its approach to vibe coding because it was causing huge problems.

But that doesn’t mean it’s gone away. Instead, code written by AI piloted by juniors is now to be checked by a senior before being sent out.

The bugs haven’t gone away, though. As mentioned, more Kindle updates have been pulled back from rollout, and bugs in the Audible app are actually costing people real money.

Has Google fallen into the same trap?

This is harder to say. There are no such smoking guns or admissions as there were with Amazon. But we have Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, talking positively about vibe coding.

So, is it hard to believe Google is pushing vibe coding behind the scenes? I wouldn’t say so.

But the problems are hitting Google-owned properties.

The YouTube app is unstable and a bit of a mess, while Pixel phones aren’t doing much better.

The most alarming part of this isn’t what it says about the industry right now, though. It’s about what this might say about the future.

Is this what a vibe-coded future looks like?

If AI is the future and vibe coding is where the tech industry is headed, is this what we should really be looking forward to? Broken apps, bug-ridden operating systems, and hallucinating AI chatbots?

I have no evidence that this is happening, except for Amazon, where it clearly is. But the trends in broken apps and updates are so similar that I’m willing to take a guess and assume that it is.

If it is true, the future doesn’t look great for tech in general, and software in particular. Unless companies stop using AI, either due to the bubble popping or the costs becoming prohibitive, we’ll have more of this to look forward to.

If an AI-powered future is one of bad updates and broken apps, then it’s absolutely not worth it.